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Empty great cities of the world ... Paris, New York, London.
The New Yorker has put up short films capturing this eerie experience we're all going through on youtube.
But watching these stark images, reminds me of nothing so much as the final moments of On the Beach--Nevil Shute's end-of-times novel-turned-movie from 1959.
Those final moments are here ....
3 comments:
In the 1980's I read many science fiction anthologies. In one short story, near the end, you realize the main characters you have been following are not humans, but aliens who are flying around Earth, looking for signs of life. They find evidence a past civilization – by the descriptions, clearly ours. But no sign of the creators. How did they disappear? Finally they do find… a giant monument with an inscription they have to translate. It appears to be the newest construction, the last work of humans on Earth. It says, in mile-high letters, "Just the Flu". End of story. Now I need to try to find that anthology and remember who wrote it!
I believe the story you're looking for appears in The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF.
You can read it online at ...
https://e-libra.me/read/581180-the-mammoth-book-of-apocalyptic-sf.html
Does this seem familiar?
"Just the flu. ... winning the Campbell Memorial Award in 2000 as the Best New Writer in the SF field, ... Much later when the crowd had gone away the monument stood alone in the dark, displaying to the moon the inscription... "
Yes! Though now I am not sure if that is the one, or if after reading too many apocalyptic short stories as a pre-teen, I melded them all together into one memory-scene in my mind! Maybe I will spend some time with these imagined world-endings again, to take my mind off the current real(ish) one.
Is the world really ending if part of how it ends is that no one believes anything is true anymore? (If a world falls in a forest of competing mythology, does anyone know when "it" is gone?) I am not sure that exact aspect was covered in the older science fiction I read years ago... Though the idea that the reader and narrator see a tragedy that the characters in the story cannot fully appreciate as they live it certainly was covered, again and again . . .
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